The Semester I Rode to Class With My Son

I had a psychology test in eight hours and I had not opened the book.

I sat there for a long time. I thought about calling Mrs. Pruitt in the morning and withdrawing.

I thought about how much easier my life would be without this. I thought about my father saying I had made my bed.

When I finally went inside, the kitchen light was on. Dylan was asleep at the table, his head on his algebra book.

Next to him was my psychology book, open, with yellow sticky notes on every page I had to know.

He had gone through the study guide Mr. Davis handed out and marked every single answer in the book for me.

In pencil, in the margins, in his terrible handwriting. Some of them were wrong. Most of them were right.

I woke him up and sent him to bed. Then I sat at the table and read every page he had marked, until four in the morning.

I got an eighty-eight on that test. I would have failed it without him.

Thanksgiving was at Daddy’s, like always. All three of my brothers came with their families.

Nineteen of us, with two tables pushed together in the front room and the little ones at a card table in the kitchen.

Daddy carved the turkey at the head of the table. He asked Dylan about school before the gravy had gone around once.

How were his classes. Was the algebra hard. Did he like his English teacher.

Dylan answered every question politely. Then, every time, he looked down the table at me. I knew what he was doing.

He was leaving the door open for his grandfather to turn and ask me the same thing.

Daddy never turned. He talked about Dylan’s classes for most of the meal.

He talked about the price of corn, and the new grain bins going up at the elevator, and the Salukis’ football season. He did not say one word about my classes.

I did not bring them up. I want to be clear that I was not trying to make a point.

I just was not there to be graded by him. I had Mr. Hale for that.

When we were doing dishes, Kurt’s wife, Dawn, dried beside me at the sink and said, very low, “He knows, you know. Kurt says he asked Darrell how you were doing in school. He just won’t ask you.”

“Then he can keep asking Darrell,” I said. I was not proud of the way it came out, but I did not take it back.

Finals were the second week of December. I took my anatomy final on a Tuesday morning with my hands shaking so badly I had to hold my pencil with both of them for the first ten minutes.

There were a hundred questions and a lab practical.

Mr. Hale had set out twenty stations with bones and models and one preserved cat, which some of the younger students had been dreading all semester.

I had turned and bathed and dressed real human beings for sixteen years. A cat in a tray did not scare me.

When I got to the station with the hand bones, I said Sally and her party under my breath and got every one of them right.

Grades posted the Friday before Christmas. I looked at them on my phone at Maple Grove, sitting in the break room during my supper break, with a cup of coffee going cold next to me.